Daphne Guinness is just the latest fashion icon to impersonate David Bowie in a fashion magazine this January — in her case, German Vogue. The photographer? None other than musician Bryan Adams.

Coincidentally, in the current issue of Vogue Paris, Kate Moss appears on the cover as a Bowie double. It's an old reference: Hannelore Knuts posed as Bowie for Steven Meisel in a 2001 issue of American Vogue. Iselin Steiro did a Thin White Duke-era Bowie shoot for Vogue Paris in October 2010; this came just after Raquel Zimmerman's June/July, 2010, Vogue Paris Bowie shoot. In May of 2011, Numéro ran a Bowie spread starring Edita Vilkeviciute. Kate Moss has in fact played Bowie on a Vogue cover twice — she also did the honors for British Vogue in May of 2003. And that's just a sampling of fashion's seemingly endless sampling of David Bowie.

The German Vogue shoot does have the distinction, however, of being the only Bowie fashion shoot to date to be chronicled by the New Yorker, at least as far as I'm aware. The heiress and fashion collector was profiled by Rebecca Mead last September; the piece ends on the scene of the shoot with Adams. The magazine shot inside Guinness's apartment.

Rebecca Mead's profile of Daphne Guinness from this week's New Yorker aims to explain the …
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Mead reported at the time:

Wearing one blue contact lens, a red-and-blond wig, and a narrow black smoking jacket, Guinness uncannily evoked Bowie in his Thin White Duke guise, though she was, possibly, thinner and whiter. To incarnate Ziggy Stardust, she let a stylist place an enormous metallic collar around her neck; the stylist apologized for any discomfort. "Are you kidding?" Guinness replied. "Uncomfortable is the name of the game."

Teresa Alfonso, Guinness's personal assistant, tried to get her to eat some of the pasta that had been prepared for the production team. "If I eat, I can't work," Guinness, who had been subsisting on Red Bull and Ensure, said. "I'll eat when I'm dead."

Later, wrote Mead, Guinness — who reportedly has a wonderful singing voice, and once had ambitions to train as an operatic soprano — started to sing while Adams accompanied her on the guitar.

To convey Bowie's Space Oddity period, Guinness dressed in a silver metallic minidress by Viktor and Rolf, and sat on her red velvet couch as two assistants smeared her bare legs with moisturizer. Adams, who had brought a guitar to the shoot, started strumming the Bowie song "Moonage Daydream," and the room fell silent as Guinness sang along in a small, clear voice, gazing into the distance, as if she were alone. "Keep your electric eye on me, babe," she sang. "Put your ray gun to my head."

Several of the photographs — including two taken outdoors, in what appears to be rain that caught the light — are very beautiful, in a slightly unearthly way that seems appropriate to both Bowie and the heiress.

But I'm sad the magazine apparently killed this one shot Mead so vividly described:

After the song was finished, Adams went back to his camera, and Guinness, with help, placed an enormous bell jar that had been on a side table over her head, like an astronaut's helmet. The glass was thick and heavy, and it looked like it might crush her waifish shoulders, but the visual effect was impressive, and Adams's camera snapped away. Then Guinness hunched her silvery shoulders, and slithered farther into the bell jar, so that it almost rested on top of her head and extended down to her biceps. "How is this?" she asked from inside the bell jar, and her muffled voice was otherworldly, as if coming from far, far away.

How sad that German Vogue saw fit to deny us all the chance to see Daphne Guinness lounging with a bell jar on her head. At least she has interesting wallpaper.